All posts tagged ‘LROC’

A portion of the Apollo 17 landing site from new LRO images. (Image: NASA/ASU)

The Apollo missions to the Moon. Few things stand out in modern human history that are as momentous. Now, thanks to the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, or LRO for short, we have new views of three of the Apollo landing sites in unprecedented detail.

The LRO mission has been producing incredible data. We have reported on the images of the Apollo landing sites taken previously and the stunning image of Tycho Crater. We have also talked about LRO’s sister mission, LCROSS, that impacted the Moon and led to a discovery of ice on the lunar south pole. We have come to expect a great deal from LRO imagery. The new images that were released on Tuesday continue to astound.

The images show the Apollo 12, 14, and 17 landing sites in amazing detail. The LRO team was able to capture these images without changing the average altitude of the LRO orbit. They simply made LRO’s orbit slightly more elliptical and moved the orbit’s low point, called the periapsis, to around 21 km and to occur when LRO was on the bright side of the Moon. If you want to understand what this means from the perspective of Orbital Mechanics, you can start digging in at Wikipedia’s article on Elliptic Orbits or, if you really want to geek-out and math and physics don’t scare you, check out Fundamentals of Astrodynamics by Bate, Mueller, and White.

Today’s image APOD image from the Tycho Crater is an image taken as an oblique view, where the image is captured from a position other than straight overhead and was taken on June 10th, less than a month ago. The mountains are actually in the center of the Tycho Crater. If you take a look at the overhead image on Google Moon of the crater you can clearly see these mountains in the context of the crater. You can also switch the view to elevation and look at the detailed topographical data.

This image is simply majestic and is now my desktop wallpaper. Be sure to check back in to APOD daily for many more stunning images and look through the extensive archive going back to the mid-90s.

The views and opinions expressed in this article are my own and do not necessarily represent the views of NASA. The articles I write for GeekDad are independent of my day-job and I am not officially representing NASA in this capacity.